Western Digital unveils WD Black NVMe SSD

Western Digital has officially unveiled and launched its newest WD Black NVMe M.2 2280 PCIe SSDs which will be available in 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB capacities and use WD's in-house controller paired up with Sandisk 3D TLC NAND, offering sequential transfer speed of up to 3,400/2,800 MB/s.

According to details provided by Western Digital and a couple of reviews that have already appeared online, the WD Black NVMe SSD - not to be confused with the earlier available WD Black PCIe SSD, is based on a standard M.2 2280 single-sided form-factor with NVMe PCIe gen3 x4 interface and uses Western Digital's own controller combined with Sandisk 64-layer 3D TLC NAND and SK Hynix DDR4-2400 DRAM cache.

Performance wise, the new WD Black NVMe SSD series sequential and random performance heavily depend on the actual capacity so the 250GB model ends up with 3,000/1,600 MB/s of sequential read/write performance with 4k random performance peaking at 220k/170k IOPS. The 500GB model peaks at 3,400/2,500 MB/s with the random 4k performance of 410k/330k IOPS while the top 1TB model hits 3,400/2,800 MB/s and random peaks at 500k/400k IOPs.

The endurance for the 500GB and 1TB hits 0.3 DWPD with 300 TBW and 600 TBW, respectively, while the 250GB model hits 0.4 DWPD with 200 TBW. The entire series is covered by a five year warranty.

The WD Black NVMe series - the company promises - will be available soon with an MSRP set at $119.99 for the 250GB model, $229.99 for the 500GB one and $449.99 for the 1TB model, putting some pressure on Samsung's 960 EVO lineup.